What’s Better, Brightline-West or a Transportation Tunnel?

Source: KTNV

Brightline West is a project to build a train route from Rancho Cucamonga in Los Angeles, CA to Las Vegas, NV. The plan is to have this 240 mile long system operational by the opening of the 2028 Olympics in Las Angeles. This way people from around the world who visit the LA Olympics will have an easy way to travel to Las Vegas and have fun gambling a bit of money, seeing shows, and experiencing the restaurants. I too enjoy Las Vegas once in a while, mainly for the shows.

I’ve live in Northern California but have driven the road between Los Angeles and Las Vegas several times. It’s long and dry and so far I’ve never encountered as much traffic as shown in the cartoon above. Still, if I lived in Los Angeles I would be in favor of a faster way to get from one town to the other. But is Brightline, or any train for that matter, the best solution?

Many people believe that public transportation is the best form of transportation. Packed trains can carry a lot of people.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Unfortunately, trains that run a regular schedule are not always packed. At some times of the day, trains will be packed, true. But at other times of the day, trains are mostly empty. The train schedules basically run the trains as often as possible during hours when there will be sufficient passengers to justify running the train. Trains are large, so if there are too few people, they lose money. To reduce the losses trains will run at a smaller number of time slots.

Everyone along the line learns these facts and accommodates to them. The Brightline train to Las Vegas will be no different. I enjoy trains, so please don’t get me wrong. But having studied Transportation Tunnels, I feel the tunnels are superior to most if not all trains.

Within tunnels cars will typically travel at 120MPH (193KPH). High speed trains in Europe, Japan, and China can run at 200MPH (320KPH). For the LA to LV route, 240 miles, this means a train travel time of 1 hour 6 minutes vs a car travel time of 2 hours. So for starters the train seems better.

However, to take the train we need to arrive at the train station early, park the car, walk to the terminal, buy a ticket, (or we already spent the time to buy a ticket, but that’s still time!), get to the platform, board the train and sit down, and then wait for departure. All of this can easily take a half hour or more. So, the train could take around 1.5 hours while the car in a tunnel will take 2 hours.

The cost to build the Brightline train system is estimated to be $12 billion with $3 billion from the US Department of Transportation. At $10 million per mile, a bi directional Transportation Tunnel system should cost around $2.4 + $2.4 = $4.8 billion. So from a total cost perspective, Transportation Tunnels win.

The cost of a ticket to ride the Brightline train is estimated to be $400 round trip per person. The cost to use a Transportation Tunnel is estimated to be around 20 cents per mile. This means a round trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and back would cost around $96 for the car. So if you go alone that’s the price. If you take a friend, then the cost per person is $48. And if you travel with a family of 4 or 3 friends, the cost per person is just $24. It seems Transportation Tunnels win this criteria too.

Source: Teslarati

If you want to watch a movie in your car, you can do that. All cars using Transportation Tunnels will be fully automated. This means drivers will not be driving the cars, a computer will. And that frees everyone in the car to watch a movie during the journey.

Of course, if you want to watch a movie on the Brightline train, you can do that too.

Source: Yahoo

If you want to leave at 3 in the morning, there probably won’t be any trains running. The Transportation Tunnels, however, will be open. With Transportation Tunnels, you can depart whenever you want. With Planes and Trains, you must leave in time to catch a scheduled departure.

Finally, when you arrive at your destination, in this case Las Vegas, you will have your car with you. If you want to go sight seeing, you can.

So to recap, tunnels cost less to build, tunnels cost less to use (10%/person for a single rider or 2.5%/person for a group of 4 in a car), tunnels get you to the destination in essentially the same amount of time, tunnels are far more flexible concerning when you can go, and finally, after arriving in Las Vegas if you decide you want to go sight seeing to visit Hoover dam, you will have your car with you to go wherever you choose.

There is, however, one attribute Brightline West will have that riding in a car in a tunnel won’t have. Within the train you can stand up, walk around, and watch the countryside pass by outside. The view from inside the train is better than the view from inside the car. The best you could do in the car would be to display the outside view on the video monitor and allow car passengers to gimble the viewing direction to watch the landscape go by. The view would of course be pre-recorded. So you could see the outside on a screen, but that isn’t the same as watching it out of the train window.

Source: Google

This one positive attribute is, in my opinion, unlikely to sway people to use the system once a Transportation Tunnel is constructed along this lucrative route. Think about it for a moment. For a couple, it would cost $800 to take the train or $96 toll plus $30 for electricity to take the car. The advantages of the car will win this dilemma.

It seems to me that Transportation Tunnels are the future of short to medium range travel. Airplanes are still much faster for long trips. But at 120MPH where you can watch a video during the journey, you can be 400 miles (640 km) away within the time it takes to watch a couple movies, eat a meal, or take a nap.

Whenever someone builds a Transportation Tunnel between Los Angeles and Las Vegas I expect the Brightline West train system will go bankrupt. But this won’t be for a few years. Still, it’s unsettling to watch people enthusiastic about building a wonderful system that you know will ultimately join the dinosaurs.